Welcome to LORE, now in podcast form! Henceforth, I shall occasionally substitute my weekly essays with LORE: The Podcast, a home for conversations with some of today’s most interesting thinkers on communications and culture. If you’re not already subscribed, you can do so here:
Today, we’re talking to Jon Wu. Jon is a former investor and consultant and more recently the founder of fortyIQ, a frontier tech storytelling firm. (He’s also worth a follow on X, where he has almost one hundred thousand followers.) Jon runs positioning sprints for companies and has spent years in the weeds of social strategy, so he understands better than almost anyone how to be honest about what’s actually working.
I was excited to chat with Jon because we’re both seeing that the old playbook for getting attention doesn’t work anymore. Corporate announcements drop with a whimper, and even people with big audiences are struggling to break through. So we sat down to suss out what’s next.
We ended up covering way more ground than I expected: why “quality over quantity” is usually cope, how positioning documents are becoming the input layer for AI content systems, why taste can’t be written down and handed to someone else, and what creative work looks like when all the busywork gets automated.
Hit play in the image above to give it a listen!
Here’s where to find the best stuff:
The For You Page algorithm [00:57] — The TikTok-ified algorithm broke the corporate comms playbook, so how do you win it now?
“Go actually direct” [03:22] — IRL and niche comms that don’t scale are replacing top-of-funnel social. The flywheel is smaller and tighter than you think.
GTM engineering [07:10] — If you’re running manual processes in 2026, you’re way behind. Automation enables velocity.
The emotional cope of “quality over quantity” [08:30] — Most people who say they prefer quality are really just afraid of flopping. You need quantity to figure out quality.
Why Dario Amodei and Josh Kushner can take a banger-first approach and you can’t [12:40] — If you’re independently, remarkably successful despite your complete lack of talking about your business, then yeah, people will listen when you do. That’s not true for 99.9% of us.
Positioning documents as LLM input [18:35] — Your positioning sprint is the code on which your entire content strategy runs. The better you communicate things to a human, the better you communicate them to a machine.
Why taste can’t be externalized [25:18] — Jon tried to write down his brain and inject it into other people’s heads. It didn’t work. We talk about what makes creative work irreducibly human, even in an AI era.
Storytelling as business strategy [36:34] — When you strip away the busywork, “why are we doing this thing” becomes the question, the whole thing.
Dope illustration by Blair DeCrane.
